Imagine this: you're at the trailhead, staring down a path everyone takes, well-trodden and predictable. Safe. Easy. But safe doesn’t stick.
Ideas worth their weight don’t sit pretty in polished structures. They’re buried, raw and stubborn, out on the fringes, wrapped in barbed wire, or hiding behind the rocks no one looks under. You have to start where it feels wrong, uncomfortable—a place where you can’t yet see the outline but feel the pulse of something new.
The best ideas? They’re the ones that catch you off guard, that make you feel uneasy because they don’t fit into anything familiar. They’re concepts you have to wrestle with, dragging them through mud and thorns before they’re ready to take form. It’s instinct to try to pull them back onto the track, mold them into shapes we’ve seen before. But the real work, the good stuff, doesn’t happen there.
When you start from scratch, you’re not adapting old ideas; you’re carving a new space. You’re out in the wild, your senses on high, not knowing what’ll emerge, but you know it’ll hit different. Because if you find a way of saying something that gets under the skin, you’ve tapped into something real, something that sticks. People feel that.
Starting new is uncomfortable, yes, but that’s the point. The edges are sharp, and it doesn’t make sense right away—it feels like stepping off the known path, knowing you might not find your way back. But the beauty? The audience can sense it. They know when something is fresh, untested, honest. And it pulls them in because they’re tired of the same old echoes.
So next time you’re concepting, think beyond tweaking what’s been done. Push into the unknown, to where it feels wrong before it feels right. Because once you’ve uncovered something raw and real, it won’t need a familiar track to stay grounded—it’ll carve its own.
Comments